Improving trust in composite eServices via run-time participants testing

Abstract

The Service Oriented Architecture paradigm promises to open and integrate Public Administration offices in order to provide high-value e-services to citizens. Nevertheless to foster real usage of e-services by citizens, in majority still not fully acquainted with Internet technologies, it is necessary to put in place mechanisms to reduce as much as possible perceived system misbehavior. e-Services often handle personal and sensible data, therefore trust on the behavior of the system becomes of primary importance. In this paper, focusing on run-time composition of e-services, we provide an approach that reduces the possibility that the system will fail as consequence of interoperability issues among run-time discovered services, and after that sensible data have been provided by the citizen. The approach uses run-time testing to assess interoperability between services, and model-checking based techniques to reduce the number of test-cases to be applied. An exemplificative case-study is also illustrated and discussed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.